Bob Barker, retired host of The Price Is Right, dead at age 99: publicist | CBC News

A publicist says popular game show host Bob Barker, a household name for a half-century as host of Truth or Consequences and The Price Is Right, has died at his home in Los Angeles. Barker was 99.

Barker died Saturday morning, according to publicist Roger Neal.

Barker retired in June 2007, telling his studio audience: “I thank you, thank you, thank you for inviting me into your home for more than 50 years.”

From radio to TV

Barker was working in radio in 1956 when producer Ralph Edwards invited him to audition as the new host of Truth or Consequences, a game show in which audience members had to do wacky stunts — the “consequence” — if they failed to answer a question — the “truth,” which was always the silly punchline to a riddle no one was ever meant to furnish. (Q: What did one eye say to another? A: Just between us, something smells.)

In a 1996 interview with The Associated Press, Barker recalled receiving the news that he had been hired:

“I know exactly where I was, I know exactly how I felt: I hung up the phone and said to my wife, ‘Dorothy Jo, I got it!'”

Barker stayed with Truth or Consequences for 18 years — including several years in a syndicated version.

An even longer gig

Meanwhile, he began hosting a resurrected version of The Price Is Right in 1972. (The original host in the 1950s and ’60s was Bill Cullen.)

It would become TV’s longest-running game show and the last on a broadcast network of what in TV’s early days had numbered dozens.

“I have grown old in your service,” the silver-haired, perennially tanned Barker joked on a prime-time television retrospective in the mid-’90s.

In all, he taped more than 5,000 shows in his career.

He said he was retiring because “I’m just reaching the age where the constant effort to be there and do the show physically is a lot for me.… Better [to leave] a year too soon than a year too late.”

Comedian Drew Carey replaced him.